Richard Conniff's Blog, page 31

Saving Wildlife is Good for Your Health (But It’s Complicated)

(Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)

I live in one of the towns that gave Lyme disease its name, and yet I also love wildlife. So I rejoiced a few years ago when a study argued that maintaining healthy natural habitats with a rich diversity of wildlife can help keep people healthy, too, by protecting us from infectious diseases. Now two new studies out this week support this theory—though skeptics say they still have their doubts.

The basic idea, first proposed by ecologists Richard Ostfeld and Felicia Keesing, is called the “dilution effect,” and it works like this: for a given disease affecting multiple species—like Lyme disease or malaria—some host animals readily transmit the disease organism to the tick or mosquito that will carry it to the next victim. But other species are dead ends.

In the case of Lyme disease in the western United States, for example, western gray squirrels readily contract the bacteria and pass it on to ticks. But when those same ticks feed on western fence lizards, it kills the Lyme-causing bacteria in the ticks’ blood. That makes the lizards a bad host for Lyme, and good for us. In theory, the greater the biodiversity in any habitat, the more chances there are that a “bad” host will get the bacterium or virus and therefore fail to pass it on, diluting the impact of the disease.

The first of the new studies, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reviewed dozens of past studies to see whether there was evidence for the dilution effect in 47 disease organisms that exclusively infect wildlife hosts and another 14 that also sicken humans. The result was “broad evidence that biodiversity inhibits the abundance of both types of natural enemies.” The researchers found evidence even for the idea that a diversity of wildlife reduces agricultural pests.

Support for “this idea that biodiversity can buffer against disease outbreaks,” was so strong, said lead author David Civitello, a disease ecologist at the University of South Florida, that it highlights the need to “move beyond debates over the generality of the dilution effect” and get down to understanding the specific mechanisms that drive the effect.

The second study, also published in PNAS this week, looked at the health of people living near strictly protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon and found good news: They had significantly lower rates of malaria, acute respiratory infections, and diarrhea than their counterparts living in more developed circumstances. This was true even after weeding out the effect of factors like rainfall, income, and health services, said Subhrendu Pattanayak, a co-author of the paper and a professor of public policy and environmental economics at Duke University.

The dilution effect might be one possible mechanism making protected areas good for the neighborhood. But Pattanayak also suggested that simpler factors may be at work. “If you have standing forests, you might have fewer breeding sites for mosquitoes,” he said. Roads in particular mean more malaria, because the edge habitat they create makes for better mosquito breeding sites. Because protected areas don’t allow forests to be cleared and burned, there’s less smoke in the air, Pattanayak said, so “you might not see those respiratory infections.” But he added that the root causes of diseases are difficult to pin down: It’s not just a case of “do one thing and get the other thing. It’s a lot more complex.”

At least one prominent critics of the dilution effect idea says that’s the sticking point. “I’m just not sure that you can generalize to the extent that you have one overwhelming message that biodiversity reduces disease,” said Daniel Salkeld, a disease ecologist at Colorado State University. He was the lead author of a 2013 paper that found “very weak support at best” for the dilution effect. Instead, that paper argued, disease risk depends on the specific local host species, vector species (that is, the ticks, mosquitoes, and other organisms that transmit a disease from host to host), and the nuances of how they live and interact.

At least from a public health perspective, Salkeld said, it makes more sense to evaluate diseases and their causes on a case-by-case basis. “There’s going to be exceptions, and if you’re doing a public health initiative, you want to know whether your case is an exception or not,” he said.

Maintaining biodiversity may well reduce the overall risk that people will contract diseases, and that’s both a good thing and another reason to protect wildlife habitat. “You can manage habitats so that you reduce disease,” Salkeld said. But for a specific, targeted public health project, it may be more effective to “just do larvicide treatment for mosquitoes.” In certain cases, biodiversity could actually increase the infectious disease risk to humans, as a 2014 paper suggested.

So what’s the bottom line? The dilution effect clearly holds promise. But it’s too soon to be trying to sell habitat protection as a broad public health initiative. Even Civitello and his co-authors acknowledge that “biodiversity does not inhibit every enemy in every system.”

What’s needed now is research on mechanisms, so conservationists will have the specific details to say that if you log here, or build a road here, you are liable to make people over here very sick. And that sustainable use project you have in mind? It might not be so sustainable if you factor in the effects on human health. With that kind of know-how, protecting habitat and biodiversity could yet become a specific tool for society to apply with confidence.

Geoffrey Giller contributed reporting for this story.

That Fish for Dinner? It Comes with a Dose of Prescription Drugs

(Photo: UGA College of Ag and Environmental Sciences/Flickr)

Researchers have known for more than a decade that the pharmaceuticals we consume tend to turn up secondhand in wildlife–sometimes with horrible effects.

Chemical hormones in birth control pills, for instance, pass into the urine and are released via municipal sewage plants into the environment, where they can become potent endocrine disruptors. These drugs alter the reproductive physiology and behavior of fish downstream, with impacts including feminized or intersex males. But so far, society’s reaction has largely been a collective shrug: Those are fish, not people. Why should we care? Attempts to limit drug pollution have mostly gone nowhere.

A new study in the journal Food Chemistry should shake us out of our complacency. Chemical analyst M. Abdul Mottaleb and his team at Northwest Missouri State University went to fish counters at local supermarkets and purchased fillets of 14 different species. Then they tested them for the presence of several human pharmaceuticals, including the antihistamine found in medications like Benadryl, and the antianxiety compound found in medications like Valium.

The results: Eleven of 14 fish servings contained elevated levels of the two drugs.

Moreover, the fish weren’t just freshwater species like catfish or its Asian cousin swai, which might predictably pick up wastewater treatment byproducts in river habitats. Saltwater fish including mullet, cod, red snapper, ocean perch, bay scallops, mahimahi, Atlantic salmon, sole, and Spanish mackerel were just as likely to be contaminated.

So while eating fresh fish may well boost your levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids, this study suggests that it could also mean unwittingly consuming a cocktail of unintended drugs (not to mention mercury, PCBs, and other pollutants).

One puzzling aspect of the study, Mottaleb said, was that many of the fish specimens came from Thailand, Vietnam, and China, countries that are notorious for illegal fishing but not normally associated with heavy pharmaceutical use.

But prescription drug consumption is rapidly increasing as those countries adopt Western lifestyles, said Kathryn Arnold, a University of York ecologist who was not involved in the new study. Many Asian nations have also become generic drug producers but have few or no regulations on what pharmaceutical manufacturers dump into the environment.

The level of drugs found in the study was relatively small in human terms: You are not going to treat your anxiety or your runny nose by consuming fish. Arnold calculated that in a normal meal of any of these fish, even the highest concentrations detected would still yield less than a thousandth of the normal therapeutic dose for either drug.

Unintentionally consuming multiple drugs with the same effect could still pose a health risk, and some drugs are dangerous if taken together. The antianxiety drug diazepam (the one in Valium), for instance, shouldn’t be combined with a long list of other prescription drugs because it alters their effectiveness. But “it’s a slim risk,” Arnold said. “For me the greater worry is for fish-eating wildlife,” she added, animals like cormorants or leopard seals “whose entire diet consists of fish.”

The concentration of pharmaceuticals in any single meal is minute. But as these animals dine on the same prey fish day after day, the contaminants accumulate in their bodies, Arnold said, “and they weren’t designed to be eating any of these drugs.”

A drug that is beneficial in one species can have astonishing and unpredictable effects in another. In India in the 1990s, for instance, farmers began administering the drug diclofenac to relieve arthritis symptoms in cattle. But that drug causes fatal kidney failure in vultures, and because vultures scavenge on dead cattle, one of the largest vulture populations in the world plummeted 99 percent in just five years. Today, three vulture species are still flirting with extinction.

Effects on individual species can also cascade through entire ecosystems. Researchers in Canada recently concluded a long-term experiment in which they added human contraceptive byproducts at typical levels into a small, isolated lake. Because of the disruption to their reproductive lives, fathead minnows, a common prey fish, vanished within two years. After four years, slimy sculpin, another prey species, were down to 1 percent of their former numbers.

The devastation worked its way up the food chain to lake trout, the top predator, which lost as much as 42 percent of their biomass over the seven-year study.

Removing drug residues from wastewater treatment plant effluent is extremely expensive, especially for developing countries that haven’t yet built even the most rudimentary sewage treatment.  But in almost every ecosystem, humans are at the top of the food chain, and what happens to the plant and wildlife there will ultimately happen to us.

Think about that (and let your lawmakers know what you think) next time you step up to the seafood counter or reach for a prescription drug.

Champagne, Please! A Toast to Good News About Threatened Wildlife

Gray seals on Cape Cod

Wildlife biologists and other conservationists often suffer from chronic pessimism—not surprising, given the endlessly gloomy news about habitat loss, species extinction, and the latest delicacy being eaten by rich people in China. (“Boiled baby pangolin, dear?”) But sometimes things go right.

“There are glimmers of light that lead me to feel that what I’m doing is not absolutely mad and idiotic and senseless,” the author and captive breeding proponent Gerald Durrell once remarked. He told me this one morning on the Isle of Jersey while both of us were consuming large glasses of whiskey well before cocktail hour, or even lunch. But we toasted his point because it was a good one: There are success stories, and conservationists should cheer up and celebrate them.

A new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution makes the same point, minus the whiskey, and also proposes an agenda for dealing with the almost miraculous—but sometimes complicated—transformation of once-endangered species into commonplace neighbors.

Let’s start with a few of the success

stories. “In the nineteenth century,” the University of Vermont’s Joe Roman and his coauthors report, “the elephant seal was hunted so intensively in the North Pacific that it was presumed extinct,” and it may have been down to as few as 20 survivors by the 1880s. Today, because of protections implemented in the 1920s, there are 200,000 elephant seals—possibly more than at any time since humans first encountered the species. Likewise, “by the 1960s, American alligators were hunted to near extinction and rarely seen in the wild,” according to Roman. “Today they number in the millions and are a common sight on golf courses and in urban canals.” In the 1970s, brown pelicans, bald eagles, and red-tailed hawks also came back from the brink of oblivion because of the ban on the insecticide DDT, which inadvertently destroyed their eggs. At the moment, in fact, I am sitting on my porch watching one of the hundreds of local osprey, saved from near extinction by the DDT ban, flying home to its nest with a fish clutched in its talons like an auxiliary fuel tank.

That sort of thing can make it seem as if the world is being put right again. But to the general public, it can also seem at times that things are going wrong instead. Gray seals, which once lived all along the East Coast, from Canada down to Cape Hatteras, were largely extirpated from their home range in the 20th century. Now, thousands of them lie around on some beaches in Cape Cod and bedevil local fishermen. “One of the biggest issues if you grew up on Cape Cod in the last 6o years,” said David Johnston, a Duke University marine biologist and coauthor of the new study, “is that you didn’t see any seals then. Now they’re back, and you have no memory of seals, and maybe your parents have no memory.” So the seals on the beach end up seeming like an invasive species rather than returning natives. Even ospreys can seem like a headache to some—for instance, when there are so many of them that they nest on electric towers and short out the power.

The new article proposes four steps to ease people into the good news of species recovery: “First, when protection works, conservation scientists and nongovernmental organizations should celebrate these success stories, actively engaging the public in recording a species’ return to former ranges and framing the recovery trajectory in light of the historical abundance, ecosystem health, and natural capital.” Without that understanding, people tend to call for culls before they even understand how an animal lives.

The coauthors argue, second, that conservationists should push for down-listing and delisting of species that no longer need protection. That can free up time and resources for other plants and animals that are still in trouble. Third, wildlife biologists need to anticipate and address potential conflicts as a species recovery is occurring. People who make a living from the abalone shellfishery in southeastern Alaska were loudly resentful of “new” competition from returning sea otters. So scientists needed to explain ahead of time that the sea otters also restored the devastated kelp forests, helping other commercial fisheries because the kelp serves as a nursery ground for many species.

Finally, before anybody culls or translocates animals, the coauthors write, researchers need to understand the true costs and benefits of these decisions. A complete analysis can help transform a recovering species “from scapegoat to valued neighbor.”

Though the article doesn’t make the point, the bottom line is that conservation really works. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Congress passed landmark legislation, such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and signed international treaties, such as the Conventional on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The result is that species once irrevocably bound for extinction now routinely fly over my house and probably yours too. Yes, we need to make sure those past measures are being actively enforced.   And, yes, we need to make our craven legislatures continue to take bold new actions to protect wildlife. (Or at least not backpedal:  Senator Rand Paul’s attempt to gut the ESA is being dubbed the “Extinction Acceleration Act.”)

But now and then we should also set aside the gloom, and the whiskey, and instead raise a glass of champagne to the environmental victories all around us.

The Land Mafia Schemes to Gobble Up A Wildlife Oasis in the City

Moving in on Mumbai’s Aarey Milk Colony

When a builder hungers to develop a patch of open space, he finds an environmental consultant to conclude that there isn’t any wildlife living there. It’s an ecological desert, the consultant dutifully reports. A wasteland. Really, the developer is doing a public service by even offering to put a building there.

I have seen this Big Lie prevail at home, where critical wetland habitat in the Jersey Meadowlands has given way to a hideous mega-mall described, by Gov. Chris Christie, no less, as “the ugliest damn building in New Jersey, and maybe America.” And I saw The Lie at work again early this month on a visit to Mumbai, India’s largest city and the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the world.

The cattle stalls in the middle of Mumbai

One of the odder things about Mumbai is that it contains a 40-square-mile national park, in the middle of a metropolis of 20.5 million people. Also oddly, the park has a very agricultural 4,000-acre appendage on its southern end called Aarey Milk Colony. The name means what it suggests: In the 1940s, the city moved dairy farmers 20 miles north to what was then forested countryside with the aim of providing a reliable milk supply for the city. About 16,000 buffalo now live in open sheds there, and the rest of the colony is a mix of woodlands and fields growing fodder for the cattle. Locals sometimes refer to Aarey as “the green lungs of Mumbai.”

But pressure to develop open land has become unbelievably fierce in the surrounding area, where population density can top 71,000 people per square mile. Developers nibble away at open space, regardless of whether they actually own it. Early this year, for instance, local journalist Ranjeet Jadhav reported that the so-called “land mafia”—developers and their collaborators in government—were selling off shanty-size chunks of Aarey Milk Colony for $150 to $300 each to establish a new slum.

The common pattern with these informal developments is that some vote-hungry politician eventually arranges water and electricity for the residents. Then, having established that the land is no longer open space, the developer comes back and replaces the whole mess with high-rise (and high-priced) apartment buildings. This time, though, Jadhav’s article embarrassed local leadership enough that they demolished the new development earlier this month. And with luck, it will stay demolished for another month or two.

But the threat to open space can also come from the government itself, in the name of civic welfare. The Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation and the regional development authority have been pushing to turn 69 acres of the Aarey Milk Colony into a mass transit car shed for a new subway line. If the plan goes through, it will mean cutting down or relocating about 2,300 trees and turning open space permanently into developed land. The deal hinges on a $1 billion loan from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, which has strict environmental rules for the projects it finances. So Mumbai officials did the usual thing, hiring environmental consultants to give the Japanese bankers an Environmental Impact Assessment concluding that the area contains no wildlife.

Somewhat awkwardly, Aarey Milk Colony is in fact crawling with wildlife, as two researchers demonstrated not long ago in a richly detailed report to the state government on biodiversity there. They found that the area is home to 86 butterfly species, 13 amphibians, 46 reptiles, 76 birds (from white-throated kingfishers to greater racket-tailed drongos), and 16 mammals (including jackals and rhesus macaques). Asked how its environmental consultants managed to overlook this menagerie, Ashwini Bhide, chairwoman of the metropolitan development authority, tried not to look foolish while replying that the “no wildlife” line referred only to the fields and forests proposed for development, not to the surrounding fields and forests. Because nature is so convenient that way.

Will the Japanese bankers fall for this line? Maybe yes, maybe no. (Contact them here to offer your suggestions.) But there is an almost infinite supply of other threats to open space in Mumbai, a local activist explained to me one day as we sat in the shade outside his house. The government’s antiterrorism force now has a training facility in Aarey Milk Colony, and so does the state police force. There’s a proposal to build a highway overpass there. Also a zoo, presumably for people who are not patient enough to see the wildlife all around them in their native habitat. And there are 27 informal developments housing 45,000 people (and climbing).

High-rise apartment buildings will almost certainly follow, with each new wave of encroachment touting its precious view of the natural world until, before long, there is no natural world—no birds, no butterflies, no amphibians—left to see.

And the lungs of the city? “Soon,” the activist complained, “you will need to give people oxygen masks to breathe.”

The War on India’s Tiger Reserves

(Photo: Aditya Singh/AFP/Getty Images)

I’ve been reporting a story lately in India, and one day’s drive between two important tiger reserves reminded me that wildlife survives here only in the face of endless challenges, and with almost all the money and power working in opposition.

The day started in Bhadra Tiger Preserve in the Western Ghats mountain range, and our destination was Kudremukh National Park, 75 miles to the west, with just a thread of wildlife corridor—less than a mile in width—connecting the two.

Bhadra is a beautiful forest with a dirt road winding among tall, straight teak trees. The tigers were in hiding, but there were chital deer in herds, and solo muntjac deer peering out at us nervously. A giant squirrel with big ears and a red tail half again as long as its body stared down. Yellow-toed green pigeons with gorgeous crimson wings busied themselves at a patch of mud.

People were the main challenge here, as everywhere in India. More than 700 families used to live in this forest, in 13 villages. The politically correct point of view, especially among human rights activists, is that indigenous people should stay in the forest, as an integral part of the natural world. There is plenty to be said for this point of view when loggers, palm oil producers, and oil companies hack down forests around tribal people who have always lived there.

But the reality in India

, according to Ullas Karanth of the Wildlife Conservation Society, is that village cattle graze down the vegetation, and village men routinely set snares for animals, decimating the population of native prey necessary for a place like Bhadra to be a tiger reserve in reality, not just in name. The villages also typically have no electricity; no water; no access to schools, medicine, or public transportation; and plenty of opportunities to bump into angry elephants. The government of India provides funds to help willing residents move out of protected tiger habitat onto nearby farmland. It’s a complicated process, like everything in India, but it happened here in 2002, and it’s the reason Bhadra is beginning to look like natural habitat.

The threats also come from outside, taking bites out of that slender thread of connecting habitat, said Akarsha B.M., a WCS employee for this area. (According to local custom, the “B” stands for his place of origin, the “M” for his father’s first name.) Corruption is everywhere in India, and by way of example, he pointed out a patch of forest just uphill from Bhadra. It’s part of the 39 square miles of forest around Bhadra categorized as “district revenue lands.” That means the deputy commissioner of the district can use the land for the public good as he interprets it, even giving it away to cronies for development. In this case, a local partner of a luxury resort chain obtained a 50-year lease on 30 acres of land at 1,000 rupees a year—about $15. The forest was already being cleared to create a five-star “ecotourism” resort that would, Akarsha said, have charged 30,000 rupees (about $450) a night. No tigers allowed. It took a lawsuit, lots of ugly infighting, and some embarrassing publicity for the hotel chain before a court canceled the contract.

Next stop was a proposed dam that would have permanently separated the two tiger reserves with a reservoir. Fighting these battles is a strategic game, said Akarsha, with the same handful of conservationists working through different organizations, wearing one hat to sue government agencies and another to work with them on mutually beneficial projects. In this case, it didn’t pay to fight the reservoir on conservation grounds. Instead, the conservationists prevented it from happening by stirring up protest from the communities that were also scheduled to be flooded in the process.

Finally, we arrived at Kudremukh National Park, where the threat was an open-pit iron ore mine in the heart of the park. It was run by a company owned—go figure—by the Indian government. With its lease due to run out, the company wanted to excavate another section of the park, and it claimed to have compensated for its previous damage by planting nonnative trees on a section of the park that, on account of local wind patterns, should have remained grassland. Like most such fights, this one took 10 years of persistent campaigning and litigation by conservationists before the mine was shut down.

Later in the day, Akarsha and I got caught for hours in standstill traffic in both directions on a road that cut directly through the wildlife corridor. All of us had places to go, things to do, dreams to achieve. But a tiger would have had to make its way across on our rooftops, and it’s no easier at night, Akarsha said. Truck traffic is heavy then, to supply the raw materials for India’s rapidly growing economy.

I was impressed by the untiring work of groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society to keep some vestige of habitat intact in such a world. But I was equally in awe of the odds against them. Sending money helps. But if we want tigers or pretty much anything else to survive on our hot, crowded planet, we are all going to need to learn to live with less. How do you sell that message to 1.2 billion Indians who have every reason to think it’s their turn to live large?

 

How Bird Lovers Push Species to the Brink of Extinction

The bird market in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. (Photo: Megan Ahrens/Getty Images)

It���s sometimes said that we are loving nature to death���with our sightseeing traffic jams to gawk at bison loitering in Yellowstone National Park, and our safari vehicles huddled together to watch lions yawn in the Masai Mara.�� But few people take their affection for nature to such a destructive extreme as the bird lovers of Indonesia and Malaysia.

Roughly 35 percent of homes in that Southeast Asian region keep birds as pets. People love the sound of their singing and build them elaborately carved mahogany cages. But they prefer the birds to be wild caught, and the more unusual the better. The result, according to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation, is that wild bird populations are being drastically reduced, and some species are probably being driven into extinction.

The region is already notorious for hacking down huge swaths of old-growth forest for lumber, or to make room for palm oil and rubber plantations. But the pet trade seems to be almost as destructive to bird life, finishing off what deforestation has merely begun. Even birds that might have survived in secondary forests or on agricultural lands are vanishing.

Princeton University���s Bert Harris, lead author of the new study, focused on bird markets in Medan, Sumatra, ���one of the primary hubs of the Asian wildlife trade,��� with more than 200 bird species typically for sale. In a region with almost no field studies to monitor bird populations in the wild, Harris and his coauthors theorized that recording price and volume for different bird species in the marketplace could serve as a quick-and-dirty tool for detecting population trends in the wild.

It worked. By comparing current market data with a historical sample from 1987, the study identified species that were increasing in price while decreasing in volume as the most acutely threatened���and the bigger the price increase, the worse the threat. It���s basic economics that scarcity tends to drive up the price for anything in high demand. And in some cases, the threat to a species was also already well known. The straw-headed bulbul, for instance, is now extinct in Java, and probably in Sumatra too, and it���s on the endangered species Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

But until the marketplace said so, the IUCN didn���t know that the white-rumped shama was in equally bad shape.�� ���And that is entirely due to trapping,��� said Harris, ���because it���s not an old-growth bird.��� In fact, seven of the nine severely declining species are found in degraded forests and agricultural areas, when they can be found at all. That means they might have survived the current deforestation were it not for the pet trade. The marketplace also revealed that bird lovers were willing to pay more for shamas from small offshore islands near Sumatra, because they tend to be distinguished by different features, such as length of the tail or manner of singing. Some researchers think these island varieties may be separate species. But the pet trade may wipe them out before anybody knows for sure.

For his study, Harris wanted to compare a forest without bird traps with one that has traps, but he couldn���t find any. ���There were traps and snares everywhere, even in national parks,��� he said. The main technique is to make cages by hand out of bamboo, with a decoy bird in the bottom and a trap door on top to retain birds attracted by the decoy���s call. ���The other method is to put bird lime���sticky goo from the latex of different forest species���on branches nearby,��� Harris said. Sometimes an entire flock of the Sumatran laughing thrush or some other species would come over to investigate and be stuck there in a row, to be picked off one by one like items from the shelf at the grocery store.

At the bird markets in Medan, different species may sell for as little as 10 cents each to as much as $20,000. The expensive ones often go into singing competitions. But Harris, who attended one such competition, said it consisted of 30 caged shamas under a roof with their owners crowded behind a fence ���calling out to their birds, or whistling to them, or yelling at them.��� Harris couldn���t tell one bird from another by its song. ���Whichever bird puffs its chest out the most and dances around wins.���

Religion also drives the trade. One of the ways Buddhists gain spiritual merit is by ritually freeing birds from their cages. But to supply this market, someone has to catch the birds and get them into cages in the first place. Because the birds are generally released in cities, far away from their native habitat, almost all of them die.

Harris noted that conservationists and ornithologists have not taken advantage of marketplace trends in the past in part because it so depressing. ���People don���t want to go work in these smelly markets,��� he said. ���People want to go into the rainforest and count birds.��� The marketplace exposes them instead to birds crammed into filthy cages, often with dead birds left to rot on the bottom. Birds that are not suited to caged life, including pittas, woodpeckers, and kingfishers, are often among the merchandise, and it can be heartbreaking for a bird lover to see.

But the new study found that sending a team of four Indonesian birders into the forest to conduct a proper survey over a six-week period cost $3,097. To get the same sort of information from the marketplace, it was necessary to send just one person out on four visits to record prices and species, at a cost of $131. With money for conservation almost nonexistent in Indonesia, that makes marketplace data an irresistible tool for understanding the pet trade and ultimately steering it toward captive-bred birds.

Harris said Indonesia is unlikely to take action to stop the trapping anytime soon. ���It doesn���t seem to be a high priority. Indonesia has a lot of problems to deal with,��� he said. But the Wildlife Crimes Unit there has recently taken significant action against traffickers, including a sting that broke up a gang of tiger poachers. So there is hope. Bird lovers can push for more of that kind of news by supporting conservation groups that are active in the region, particularly the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Wildlife Fund.

Where the Rubber Meets the Orangutan

A lot of shoppers now routinely reach for fair-trade coffee. Many also look for foods that contain no palm oil, a notorious destroyer of tropical forests. Few, however, think about the tires on their car. But the typical car tire is��28 percent natural rubber. It comes from rubber trees grown on plantations, and those plantations are rapidly replacing forests across vast swaths of Southeast Asia.

According to a new paper published in Conservation Letters, the rubber tree is now the fastest-growing crop in Southeast Asia. Car tires consume 70 percent of the production, and demand is booming, largely because of the rapid rise of the Chinese economy. Without major changes, the rubber trade is on track to eat up between 10 million and 21 million acres of tropical forest over the next decade.

The larger figure works out to more than 30,000 square miles of forest, an area roughly the size of South Carolina, and it will mean taking down habitat for a stunning diversity of species, from orchids to elegant sunbirds.

Many of the forests that are likely to become rubber plantations are hot spots for plant and animal diversity. When the Sundaland region of Borneo and Sumatra goes, for instance, it���s likely to take the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan with it. The cattle-like banteng, with fewer than 5,000 individuals surviving across Southeast Asia, is another likely victim.

Oddly, the threat from rubber production has mostly escaped public scrutiny, even as other industries operating in tropical habitats���coffee growing, palm oil production, and timber harvesting���have come under heavy pressure to adopt more responsible practices. Perhaps the rubber trade just seems too far removed from our lives because we don���t eat or drink it.�� Or maybe it���s got something to do with our moral blind spot about automobiles. But with rubber tree plantations already occupying about 71 percent as much former habitat in Southeast Asia as do palm oil plantations, it���s unlikely that this obscurity will last.

One partial remedy, according to the University of Anglia���s Eleanor Warren-Thomas, lead author of the new study, would be a certification system like those now in place for the lumber and palm oil industries. Without some such certification scheme, she said, ���it���s difficult to think of how you could influence large parts of the rubber production industry.��� These ���sustainable��� harvesting schemes are by no means perfect: They don���t always target the right criteria, are susceptible to corruption, and can be difficult to enforce.�� But ���they do have an impact,��� Warren-Thomas said.

A group of governments and rubber industry associations have begun working toward this sort of certification as part of the Sustainable Natural Rubber Initiative. But the guidelines the group recently issued leave much to be desired, said Warren-Thomas. ���Biodiversity is mentioned, protected areas are mentioned, but only very briefly,��� she said. And in those sections, the guidelines simply tell companies that they should ���demonstrate compliance with relevant local legal requirements.��� That phrase is laughable in the context of the weak regulations that exist in many Southeast Asian countries.

Those laws are almost never sufficient to protect local biodiversity. In any case, Warren-Thomas noted, just following the law should be standard behavior, not something that gets rewarded with a certification. ���You should go above and beyond that and be making independent assessments��� of where plantations can be situated to do the least damage, she said. At the moment, the new guidelines are also completely voluntary.

The other problem is that across Southeast Asia, there���s enormous variation in how rubber is grown, from vast monoculture plantations where almost no native species can survive to small agroforestry holdings that can provide high-quality habitat for many species, even if they aren���t as good as pristine forest. So any sustainability measures would have to be tailored to particular regions or plantation types. And the plantations are popping up across a range of landscapes, both on former agricultural lands and in forests. In Cambodia, rubber tree plantations have displaced the largest dry evergreen forest in Southeast Asia. Areas officially designated as protected for wildlife, both in Cambodia and China, have been cleared to make way for rubber plantations.

Until tires and other rubber products can be certified as forest-friendly, there���s not much opportunity for consumer choice���other than the choice not to drive in the first place. Meanwhile, though, people can demand that their governments restrict imports to rubber that doesn���t come from wrecking rainforests, said Matthew Struebig, a tropical ecologist at the University of Kent. (But with the Obama administration now pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement, don���t look for that to happen anytime soon.)

It may also help to write to tire brands���Michelin and Bridgestone are part of the ���sustainable��� rubber working group���and remind them that any certification scheme needs clear, effective, stringent requirements. Otherwise, it���s just another form of green washing.

Geoffrey Giller contributed reporting for this column.

Why Not Pay Herders to Make Wolves & Wolverines Thrive?

(Photo: Anna Yu/Getty Images)

People who kill predators don���t get much sympathy, and they don���t generally deserve any either. But there is an exception: impoverished herders and pastoralists whose animals are being killed by lions, tigers, wolves, or other large carnivores. These people are often caught in a bind: Kill a protected animal and risk fines or imprisonment, or watch their livestock vanish and their families go hungry.

In Sweden, the government has been trying to ease this dilemma with an innovative strategy that aims to encourage coexistence. It rewards herders as local carnivore populations increase���and a new study says it works.

In the Arctic regions of northern Scandinavia, the S��mi people, also known as Lapps or Laplanders, live by herding semi-domestic reindeer. But they share the landscape (and often the reindeer) with wolverines���big, bearlike weasels with ferocious personalities. (Their aggressiveness has made wolverines a popular team mascot, generally among people who have never met one.) To defend their livelihood, S��mi herders often end up killing wolverines, which are a protected species.

The usual remedy to reduce that kind of herder-carnivore conflict���and this is true from Wyoming to Nepal to Australia���is for governments or conservation groups to compensate the herders every time a predator takes one of their animals. But it���s a cumbersome process, usually requiring an on-site inspection, and it frequently does not work. Compensation schemes can also create perverse incentives encouraging herders to neglect their animals, in effect allowing them to be killed. These types of compensation programs also ���don���t seem to increase tolerance for the wildlife in question,��� said Adrian Treves, founder of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin���Madison, who was not involved in the new study, ���and if you don���t increase tolerance for the wildlife, it���s difficult to reduce poaching.���

So instead of rewarding herders when things go wrong, why not design ���conservation performance payments��� to reward them when they go right?

That���s the approach in Sweden. Since 2002, herders there have earned extra income every time wolverines are born in their area. The idea is to give the herders an incentive to keep the wolverine population strong, a disincentive to kill them, and some money to replace any reindeer that the wolverines take.

But given the deep and bitter antagonism toward predators, can that sort of scheme work? The new study from the Grims�� Wildlife Research Station in Sweden says yes. Researchers there looked at long-term data from radio-collared wolverines and from a national population-monitoring program.

The study, published online in Conservation Letters, found that poachers have predictably continued to kill some wolverines. But since the new scheme went into effect, they have killed far fewer females than males. The S��mi are not stupid; females are responsible for giving birth to wolverine pups, and compensation is based on those births. But the effect on populations has been substantial. While populations had been slowly increasing since Sweden first protected wolverines in 1969, they began to grow dramatically as a result of the new compensation scheme, up from 57 registered births in 2002 to 125 in 2012.

It���s possible that more males ended up being killed because of differences in behavior between males and females. But the researchers didn���t find any evidence of that. Rather, they concluded that ���the lower poaching rate for females is actually an effect of the payment made to the reindeer herding communities,��� according to Guillaume Chapron, one of the paper���s coauthors.

But there is a potential hitch, or what scientists call a ���confounding factor,��� according to Treves. The new compensation scheme required active monitoring of wolverines to determine the number of new litters. So ���we���re not actually sure if the payments reduced poaching or if the monitoring and verification reduced poaching,��� said Treves. Further studies to sort out those effects would be useful. For now, though, this type of payment appears to work. ���Poaching can be reduced,��� said Treves, ���by a careful application of some sort of monitoring or enforcement as well as an incentive for the poachers or their communities to see value in the endangered species.���

Treves thinks that many endangered carnivores around the world could benefit from the Swedish method of ���paying for live carnivores rather than for dead reindeer,��� as he put it, from wolves in Wisconsin to lions in Tanzania. Each region would need to tweak the compensation scheme to fit local conditions, but ���I don���t think that���s an insurmountable obstacle,��� he said.

The livestock-versus-carnivore conflict is an ancient battle, and the carnivores have almost always been on the losing end of the deal, with many now facing extinction in the wild. Altering that deadly dynamic has proved almost impossible up to now. But biological studies over the past few decades have also taught us that these big scary predators are the driving force that keeps ecosystems healthy. That means we have to learn to live with them if we want any other wildlife to flourish.

Sweden���s bid to get beyond the old shoot-shovel-and-shut-up psychology to one where herders and carnivores celebrate a happy event more or less together could thus be our best way forward.

Geoffrey Giller contributed reporting for this column.

“Extinct” Monkey Photographed For First Time Ever

A lovely photo, and a rare encouraging wildlife story from West Africa.

Here’s the press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

Two primatologists working in the forests of the Republic of Congo have returned from the field with a noteworthy prize: the first-ever photograph of the Bouvier���s red colobus monkey, a rare primate not seen for more than half a century and suspected to be extinct by some, according to WCS (the Wildlife Conservation Society).

The elusive primate was recently photographed by independent researchers Lieven Devreese and Ga��l Elie Gnondo Gobolo within Ntokou-Pikounda National Park, a 4,572-square-kilometer (1,765-square-mile) protected area created on advice from WCS in 2013 to safeguard gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and other species.

The field researchers set off in February 2015 to

try to photograph Bouvier���s red colobus and establish the present distribution of this unique primate species in the Republic of Congo. Guided by local people familiar with red colobus vocalizations and behavior, the team found a group of red colobus in the swamp forests along the Bokiba River in the Ntokou-Pikounda National Park.���� ���Our photos are the world���s first and confirm that the species is not extinct,��� Devreese said.

WCS helped in the search for Bouvier���s red colobus with logistical support and provided the unpublished survey records of red colobus monkeys in Northern Congo.

���We���re very pleased indeed that Lieven and Ga��l were able to achieve their objective of not only confirming that Bouvier���s red colobus still exists, but also managing to get a very clear close-up picture of a mother and infant,��� said WCS���s Dr. Fiona Maisels. ���Thankfully, many of these colobus monkeys live in the recently gazetted national park and are protected from threats such as logging, agriculture, and roads, all of which can lead to increased hunting.���

Bouvier���s red colobus (Piliocolobus bouvieri) is a species of monkey endemic to the Republic of Congo, about which virtually nothing is known. It has been considered a subspecies of a larger colobus taxonomic group in the past, but the most recent treatment lists it as a full species.

The species was first described in 1887 and is only known from a couple of museum specimens collected from three localities over 100 years ago. The authors of a book written in 1949 mention that the species occurs in the swamp forests between the lower Likouala and Sangha Rivers, as well as along the Alima River farther to the south. The last unverified sightings of Bouvier���s red colobus monkey occurred in the 1970s.

Recent surveys by WCS had previously recorded red colobus in what is now Ntokou-Pikounda National Park in 2007 and 2014, but they were very rarely encountered and no photograph had been taken. The new sighting and photograph confirm the presence of this threatened primate in Northern Congo. However, red colobus monkeys (there are several species)�� typically do not flee from humans but look down at them from the trees, an unfortunate behavioral characteristic that has led to them becoming very rare wherever hunters are active. They are highly threatened by the growing demand for bushmeat in the region, a trade that also threatens larger primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

James Deutsch, Vice President for Conservation Strategy at WCS, commented: ���Confirmation that Bouvier���s red colobus still thrives in the this area reminds us that there remain substantially intact wild places on Earth, and should re-energize all of us to save them before it is too late.���

 

 

Everybody’s Favorite Dinosaur Says: “Hey, Baby, I’m Back.”

Here���s a quick quiz. Choose the one that doesn���t belong:

A) Tyrannosaurus

B) Stegosaurus

C) Brontosaurus

D) Triceratops

Yes, I know, you���re way too smart for this. You chose ���C��� because you remember that everybody���s favorite dinosaur, that 16-ton vegetarian with the long neck and the whip-like tail, is really named Apatosaurus. Scientists have long since declared that Brontosaurus was a taxonomic error, and doesn���t technically exist.

In fact, it���s been 112 years since a paleontologist named Elmer Riggs first pointed out that Brontosaurus, described by Yale���s O.C. Marsh in 1879, was an awful lot like Apatosaurus, which Marsh himself had described just two years previously. Marsh thought the two species were different because one had more vertebrae than the other in the sacral region, at the base of the spine. But Riggs pointed out that the sacral vertebrae in four-limbed species, including humans, normally fuse as an individual matures. Marsh���s two specimens were thus supposedly no more than older and younger individuals of the same species.

That is, until this morning. In a paper published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, a team of paleontologists has declared that Brontosaurus is back, baby, and better than ever. They argue that Brontosaurus is different enough to be a separate genus from Apatosaurus, and that it deserves its own spot on the dinosaur tree of life.

This will come as a great relief to legions of long-suffering dinosaur enthusiasts. ���Everyone knows the dinosaur���s name and we want Brontosaurus to exist,��� Brian Switek, a paleontological writer, declared in his book My Beloved Brontosaurus. Likewise, in his book Bully for Brontosaurus, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus was ���everyone���s typical sauropod���indeed the canonical herbivorous dinosaur of popular consciousness, from the Sinclair logo to Walt Disney���s Fantasia.��� Gould thought this was logical, since the skeleton originally called Brontosaurus, now mounted in the Peabody Museum at Yale, is one of the most complete ever found. The first Apatosaurus specimen, on the other hand, was merely ���a pelvis and some vertebrae.���

But scientists���and the rest of us���were stuck with Apatosaurus because the rules of scientific naming dictate that the name given to the first properly described specimen is the name that counts. Apatosaurus (���deceptive lizard���) wasn���t even a particularly memorable name, whereas Brontosaurus (���thunder lizard���) had what modern marketing types would call stickiness, sometimes literally: In 1989, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp with an image of the dinosaur labeled ���Brontosaurus,��� defending its name choice as ���more familiar to the general population.���

The authors of the new paper did not set out to a join the popular movement to resurrect Brontosaurus. ���We were surprised ourselves��� at that result, said Emanuel Tschopp, a paleontologist at Universidade Nova in Lisbon and the lead author of the study. The research, which Tschopp undertook as part of his PhD studies, was spurred by a desire to sort out the fossils at a dinosaur museum in Aathal, Switzerland.

Tschopp soon realized that many species of diplodocids���the huge, herbivorous dinosaurs that include Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus������were not so well defined,��� he said. That led him and his co-authors on a worldwide trek to examine specimens at two dozen museums around the world and collect measurements of nearly 500 anatomical traits needed to better characterize the huge sauropods.

Separating one species from another is a tricky business even with living species. When you���re dealing with animals that have been extinct for 150 million years, it becomes exponentially harder. For one thing, skeletons are often jumbled together when they���re found, so it���s not always clear whether the bones you���re looking at all came from the same animal. Fossilized skeletons are also rarely complete, requiring extrapolation to cover the missing parts. Even with well-preserved specimens, the wear and tear from tens of millions of years can damage or deform bones in ways that can be ���almost impossible to identify and least of all to quantify,��� according to the new paper.

Despite these caveats, said Tschopp, Brontosaurus clearly deserves to be a separate genus from Apatosaurus. The article identifies several specific differences that can differentiate the two, most notably that ���Apatosaurus has a wider neck than Brontosaurus,��� Tschopp said. Many of the other differences are highly technical, he said, and too difficult to explain in non-scientific terms. For the moment, suffice it to say that the article describing them runs on for 298 pages.

Don���t Look Down���You���re Probably Swimming With a Dinosaur

Tschopp expects that the revived name will generate a lot of discussion, and perhaps also pushback. It took a while for people to accept that Brontosaurus wasn���t a valid name. Now, he said, ���I guess it will also take some time��� for people to accept that it���s back.

Some, however, are already embracing the new finding. ���I���m just delighted that Brontosaurus is back,��� said Jacques Gauthier, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Louis Jacobs, a professor of paleontology at Southern Methodist University, has no horse in this race, but also seemed pleased. ���They certainly pulled together a big dataset,��� he said. ���Their work looks to me like it was pretty careful and thorough.��� Asked if the return of Brontosaurus made him happy, he quibbled: ���It���s not a matter of being happy or not happy. It���s where it falls out.��� Then he added: ���And if it falls out in that place, who would not be happy?���

Geoffrey Giller contributed reporting for this story.